OOOPS!

Hey guess what? Remember last year when the CIA announced (to the unrestrained glee of the NY Times) that Iran was 5 to 10 years away from getting a nuclear weapon? TIME'S UP!

Wow! That decade went fast didn't it?

Until recently, Iran had been having difficulty in making the centrifuges work together in production lines known as “cascades,” IAEA Director General Mohammad ElBaradei has been telling IAEA Board members.

But presto! In just a few months time, the Iranians have mastered this challenging technology. “We believe they pretty much have the knowledge about how to enrich,” ElBaradei told the New York Times in an interview that appeared on May 15. “From now on, it is simply a question of perfecting that knowledge. People will not like to hear it, but that’s a fact.”

Basically, our intelligence system, which brought to you previous hits such as the Iraqi WMD, had thought Iran was having trouble with the cascade process. Well, seems as if the Iranians aren't as stupid as the CIA thought they were!

They have 1300 centrifuges working in a cascade and are just enriching away! If they get 3,000 up and running they can have enough HEU to build a bomb in under a year.

With Porter Goss gone, the CIA has returned to a delicious slumber when it comes to Iran. And they have been led back to Dreamland by their overseers at the Director of National Intelligence, whose brilliant analysts – many of whom are proud alumni of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research – concluded last year that Iran would not succeed in building a nuclear weapon until “early to mid- next decade.”

That five to ten year estimate is meaningless, of course. Its relationship to reality was similar to a child’s relationship to counting: one-two-too many!

Five to ten years, of course, meant never. Not soon. Not on my watch.

And yet it’s here. Now. On their watch.

Kid Various doesn't know why anyone bought the 5 to 10 year estimate. That's total CIA-speak for "How the fuck should we know?"

North Korea? 5 to 10 years. Oops!

Pakistan? 5 to 10 years. Oops!

More so, as Kid Various has noted before, why is 5 to 10 years supposed to be comforting? Any official estimate of Iran getting the bomb that is short of NEVER should scare the bejesus out of us.

Of course, just as before, when we had plenty of time and shouldn't take any precipitous action - now it's too late and we shouldn't do anything rash.

Look, next time, whenever the CIA comes to you and says "5 to 10 years" just fucking start warming up the bombers.